Cops vs Free SpeechHow police are threatening Mumia, convicts, teachers, and all of us with censorship as well as bullets!

• The
New “gag” law in Pennsylvania that seeks to silence prisoners. This law,
cobbled together in days following Mumia’s recorded presentation to a
commencement ceremony at Goddard College, was explicitly designed to
“shut him up.” The targets of this blatantly unconstitutional law,
however, include all prisoners convicted of violent crimes!

• A
Law Suit has been filed to stop the “gag” law from being implemented!
Support for this effort is critical. Donations will go toward the fight
against the “gag” law.

• The suppression of the “Urban Dreams”
web site by the Oakland School Board. This teacher-created site of
voluntary curriculum ideas included one comparing the suppression of
Mumia’s commentaries with censorship of Martin Luther King’s later
writings. While the Superintendent of Schools has now promised to
restore the site, we must remain vigilant!

• Both of these
measures—the “gag” law in Pennsylvania, and the suppression of the Urban
Dreams website—were taken at the behest of the Fraternal Order of
Police (FOP)! The FOP is a highly politicized organization which seeks
to silence social critics such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, and dictate the
curricula in schools! The FOP and Democrat/Republican politicians will
continue their attempts at intimidation and suppression, unless we act!

•
Ferguson shows that black and Latino youth particularly are threatened
by militarized and politicized police who shoot first and ask questions
later, and frame their targets for crimes they didn’t commit. Chief
targets have included Native American Activists like Leonard Peltier,
militant working-class activists, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Black Panthers and
Martin Luther King. Mumia is currently a top target to silence. But
anyone and everyone can be on their enemies list, and in their
cross-hairs! Fight back now!

Donate Now
to fight the “gag” law!
go to:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protect-freedom-of-speech-keep-mumia-on-the-air

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Pennsylvania
legislators are trying to stop prisoners from speaking about their
ideas and experiences. Last week, PA Representative Mike Vereb
introduced a bill (HB2533) called the “Revictimization Relief Act,”
which would allow victims, District Attorneys, and the Attorney General
to sue people who have been convicted of “personal injury” crimes for
speaking out publicly if it causes the victim of the crime “mental
anguish.”

The bill was written in response to political
prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s commencement speech at Goddard College, and
is a clear attempt to silence Mumia and other prisoners and formerly
incarcerated people. We believe that this legislation is not actually an
attempt to help victims, but a cynical move by legislators to stop
people in prison from speaking out against an unjust system.

While
to us this seems like a clear violation of the first amendment,
unfortunately the PA General Assembly doesn’t appear to agree, and they
have fast-tracked the bill for approval and amended another bill (SB508)
to include the same language. The legislation could be voted on as
early as Wednesday.

If this bill passes, it will be a
huge blow to the movement against mass incarceration. People inside
prisons play a leading role in these struggles, and their perspectives,
analysis, and strategies are essential to our work. Incarcerated and
formerly incarcerated people who write books, contribute to newspapers,
or even write for our Voices from the Inside section would run the risk
of legal consequences just for sharing their ideas.

That’s
why we are asking you to take action TUESDAY OCTOBER 14 by calling
Pennsylvania lawmakers to tell them that prisoners should not be denied
the right to speak.

Please call your legislators and
demand that they vote NO on HB2533 and SB508. You can look up contact
information at
http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/.

We are also asking folks to call the following Senate leaders and ask them to stop the bill from moving forward:

Senate Majority Whip Pat Browne (717) 787-1349

Senate Minority Whip Anthony Williams (717) 787-5970

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (717) 787-4712

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (717) 787-7683

Not sure what to say on the phone? Click here for a sample call script.

Want to write a letter to your legislators, or looking for more talking points? Click here for more info!

- See more at: http://decarceratepa.info/freespeech#sthash.TtdN3AkI.dpuf

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning’s clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense. Please write them to express your support for heroic
WikiLeaks’ whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC
Chelsea Manning’s release from military prison.
It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide
support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They
need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political
prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly
unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to
release Manning, a reduction in Manning’s outrageous 35-year prison
sentence is a possibility at this stage.Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea’s clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:Secretary of the Army John McHugh

101 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Judge Advocate General
2200 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-2200

The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and
especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning’s
sentence is reduced. The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help

A suggested message: “Chelsea Manning has been
punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of
being true to her conscience. I urge you to use your authorityto reduce
Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.” Beyond that general message,
feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea
deserves clemency.

Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming
appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where
Manning’s new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to
highlight the prosecution’s—and the trial judge’s—misconduct during last
year’s trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Members of the Rasmea Defense Committee from Chicago and Detroit / Dearborn just welcomed Rasmea back from 5 weeks in a Port Huron, Michigan, jail. She arrived at the U.S. Marshal's office in Detroit for processing at approximately noon today, Dec. 11, and was greeted shortly thereafter by friends and family, who are bringing her home to Chicago now.

She looks strong, and is upbeat and excited to see more of her friends, family, and supporters soon. The defense committee wants to again thank everyone for their phone calls, letters, rallies, protests, and all the other activism that helped us get Rasmea released. She sends her love and appreciation to all, and graciously asks us to be ready for the next stage--winning the appeal and exonerating her fully.

Rasmea will be meeting with her attorneys in the next few days, and they will begin establishing strategies for the sentencing on March 10th and the appeal, respectively. We will reach out to everyone soon, and call on defense committees and supporters across the country to gear up for another intense #Justice4Rasmea campaign.

But for now, let's celebrate knowing that Rasmea will be back home safe, and ready to get back to her work with the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) and its Arab Women's Committee.

We will be welcoming her home publicly for the first time next Wednesday, December 17th, at the AAAN's event showcasing the Wishah popular dance troupe directly from Ramallah in Palestine. Join us to celebrate her, and Palestinian culture and resilience, by purchasing your tickets here!

Justice for Michael Brown

Call for March on Washington to demand justice

for Michael Brown and other
victims of police

killings of Black men and women

By The Labor Fightback Network

[Please forward widely.]

With demonstrations sweeping the country to protest the
grand jury’s exoneration of Darren Wilson and to demand justice for Michael
Brown, the need for deep and massive involvement of labor’s ranks in the
streets and in the public discourse could not be clearer.

To provide a needed national focus and to sustain the
momentum, we urge the civil rights and labor movements to join forces and
organize a March on Washington. This would give impetus to the demand that the
federal government indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown.

The Black Freedom Movement urgently needs allies in this
struggle.

The same is true of the labor movement, which also faces a
critical fight for its survival against the corporate onslaught.

Labor acutely needs the support of its allies in its fight
against such repressive anti-labor legislation as the misnamed “right to work.”
But trade unionists should support the struggles of these allies if we expect
them to support our struggles. It has to be a two-way street.

Police killings of unarmed Blacks are becoming virtually a
daily occurrence. [Note: Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra-judicially
killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012, according to a recent
study. This means that a Black person was killed by a security officer every 28
hours. The report notes that it’s possible that the real number could be much
higher.[1]

One of the most flagrant and egregious examples was the
shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice on November 22, 2014 by a Cleveland police
officer after a 911 caller said that someone was waving around a gun, which the
caller said was “probably fake,” and added “I don’t know if it’s real or not.”
(The dispatcher failed to convey this to police.) Within two seconds after
their arrival, one of the two officers on the scene shot Rice in the stomach
from ten feet away (which was captured on video and shown to the public at the
Rice family’s insistence). The boy had never pointed the gun (a toy gun) at the
police or made any threats. The police officers on the scene waited four
minutes before administering first aid. Young Rice died the next day.

The killing of Michael Brown was followed by the deaths of
two more Black men at the hands of police in the St. Louis Area. The litany of
names grows nationally: Ezel Ford in Los Angeles, Eric Garner in Staten Island,
John Crawford in Ohio, and many others. Tanesha Anderson, a mentally ill
Black woman, was killed in front of her family in Cleveland. And just recently
Akai Gurley was gunned down in New York. Meanwhile, George Zimmerman, the
vigilante executioner of Trayvon Martin, remains unpunished.

So this epidemic of unjustified police killings constitutes
a national crisis. And Black people—especially the youth—feel their lives are
in peril as police continue to kill them off with impunity.

What is to be done?

Starting with that day in August when Michael Brown was
gunned down, the Labor Fightback Network (LFN) has called for the immediate
arrest of his killer. We said convening a grand jury was unnecessary, but if it
was to be convened an independent prosecutor should be appointed and that
Darren Wilson should be put behind bars in preparation for a public trial.
Instead, prosecutor Robert McCulloch remained in place and proceeded to
manipulate the grand jury into refusing to indict Wilson, who spent four hours
testifying before it, with no cross examination.

But this is not the end of the fight to win justice for
Michael Brown and his family. It is just the first round.

Remember what happened in 1992 when Rodney King was
viciously beaten by police and his assailants were acquitted in a state court.
Under pressure—and following the riots that took place in Los Angeles after the
verdict was announced—the Justice Department tried the police under federal
civil rights laws and won convictions of two of them, who were sent to prison.

The LFN fully supports continuing demonstrations in cities
and towns across the country protesting not only Brown’s murder but also the killing
of other victims wherever they take place. Such actions are also demanding an
end to police brutality and racial profiling, along with other demands being
put forward by the Black Freedom Movement.

We urge a united front of the civil rights and labor
movements, along with progressive anti-racist community organizations, to
demand Wilson’s indictment under the federal Civil Rights Act, and to make that
demand a central focus of a march on Washington!

Some would-be academic scholars have expressed skepticism
that federal charges against Wilson could result in his conviction because the
required element of “willfulness” in killing Brown could not be proved. But
these scholars are looking at this struggle from a narrow legalistic
prism. The key to winning it is mass action in the streets to force the
federal government to act and at last provide a forum where Wilson could be
cross examined. And it is high time for the identity of those who allegedly
supported his claims in the state court to be revealed so that their versions
could be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that was lacking in the state
proceedings.

As for “willfulness,” a New
York Times article titled “Experts Weigh Officer’s Decisions Leading to
Fatal Shooting” (November 27, 2014) cites a number of different courses Wilson
could have taken, even if credence is given to his account as to the actual
sequence of events, (and a number of publicly identified witnesses have shown
by their statements that there is no basis whatever to give such credence! For
example, two workers cutting nearby trees at the time have agreed that
Brown appeared to be surrendering when he was shot dead and several other
witnesses said the same thing.)

What about a Taser instead of deadly force? No, said Wilson,
it’s too heavy to carry around. But why not put it in the back seat of the car?

What about pepper gas? No, said Wilson, it could blowback on
him. But don’t police carry shields to protect themselves against blowback?

What about staying in his car while calling for police
reinforcements and tailing Brown until they arrived? Wilson obviously preferred
to go it alone in pursuing Brown.

The fatal flaw in Wilson’s desperate attempt to avoid
responsibility for his actions is the undisputed fact that he shot Brown twice
in the head instead of some other part of his body, like his leg. That’s what
makes this a cold-blooded murder. That’s what provides the “willfulness.”

In any event, these are issues for a jury to decide in a
public trial, not dismissed, in effect, by a prosecutor in a secret grand jury
proceeding.

Enough is enough!

“ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!” That is the demand vocalized especially
by the youth in Ferguson. Their anger is deep and pervasive. Millions around
the country share it. A march on Washington, in the tradition of those called
by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., has the potential to draw huge numbers into
the streets and build a new movement, the likes of which we have not seen for
decades. Labor should use the occasion to mobilize its forces, cement
alliances, revitalize our ranks, and help turn back the reactionary, racist
tide that threatens to engulf all progressive social movements.

Donations to help
fund the Labor Fightback Network based on its program of solidarity and
labor-community unity are necessary for our work to continue and will be much
appreciated. Please make checks payable to Labor Fightback Network and mail to
the above P.O. Box or you can make a contribution online. Thanks!

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RH Reality Check
RHRealityCheck.org

Two
weeks ago, Cleveland police killed Tanisha Anderson in front of her
family's home when they'd been called by her family to help her, after
she panicked as they were taking her to a local hospital for a
psychological evaluation. Her 16-year-old daughter was watching from a
window [1] as an officer used a takedown move on her mother, forcing
Anderson face down on the icy pavement and then pressing his knee into
her back until she stopped moving.

The police told concerned
family members that Tanisha Anderson was sleeping and left her there on
the ground. When the ambulance finally arrived 20 minutes later, she was
dead. Once again, an African American family was reminded that no level
of government in the United States is set up to protect and serve the
well-being of their loved ones, no matter where they choose to live.

Tanisha
Anderson's family can't afford her funeral expenses, and as of now,
they've only raised $1,501 of their $7,000 goal. Can you help them
today?

1) The story of how a white Phoenix cop killed an unarmed black manBy Terrence McCoyDecember 5 at 3:05 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/05/how-a-white-phoenix-cop-killed-an-unarmed-black-man/

2) Officer Who Fatally Shot Tamir Rice Deemed Unfit for Duty in 2012
"Timothy Loehmann criticised by small Ohio force for breaking
down while handling live gun and his performance was called ‘dismal’,
records show"

1) The story of how a white Phoenix cop killed an unarmed black manBy Terrence McCoyDecember 5 at 3:05 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/05/how-a-white-phoenix-cop-killed-an-unarmed-black-man/

It’s
a pattern that by now has now become familiar. An officer confronts a
man he believes is behaving suspiciously. The man runs. A struggle
ensues.

The result, shown again this week in the
killing of Rumain Brisbon, has been another death of an unarmed African
American man at the hands of a white police officer. And now, as
protesters deluge the streets of Chicago and New York to condemn what
they describe as a failed justice system, some say his name deserves a
spot next to those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

Many
facts about Brisbon’s death, however, remain sketchy. To police,
Brisbon was a man with a criminal record who may have been in the middle
of drug deal when a lone police officer confronted him. To friends,
34-year-old Brisbon was a gentle father of four who was dropping off
fast food for his kids at his family’s apartment.

One
matter beyond dispute: He was not armed when a police officer fired two
bullets, killing him in the presence of his girlfriend and 15-month-old
child. “What happened here is a police officer murdered my client,”
attorney Marci Kratter, who represented Brisbon in a prior DUI case,
told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “And what the police say
happened, it doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s something not right
with it.”

Police said the officer responded
appropriately under the circumstances, and investigators did find a gun
and marijuana inside Brisbon’s black Cadillac. Maricopa County court
records show Brisbon pleaded guilty to felony burglary and possession of
marijuana in 1998, and to driving under the influence in 2009.

The events that led to Brisbon’s death began with a tip, Phoenix police spokesman Trent Clump told reporters
on Wednesday. The tipster said that a drug deal was going down inside a
black Cadillac SUV parked near a 7-Eleven. So a nearby 30-year-old
officer, who wasn’t named by police, responded to the call, later
approaching the car, reported the Arizona Republic.

Clump
claimed the officer saw Brisbon exit the car and remove something from
its rear. When the officer asked Brisbon to show his hands, the man
allegedly put them in his waistband. That prompted the officer to draw
his weapon, and Brisbon took off running. “Witnesses indicated to us
that the suspect was verbally challenging to the officer,” the Arizona
Republic quoted Crump saying.

When the officer caught Brisbon, there was a scuffle. What happened next is a little confusing.

According to reports,
Brisbon somehow made it to the house of his girlfriend, who had opened
the front door — and the cop and Brisbon literally stumbled inside.
Clump said the officer thought he felt the butt of a gun jutting from
Brisbon’s pocket. “During the struggle, Brisbon put his left hand in his
pocket and the officer grabbed onto the suspect’s hand, while
repeatedly telling the suspect to keep his hand in his pocket,” the
spokesman said. “The officer believed he felt the handle of a gun while
holding the suspect’s hand in his pocket.”

Two shots
were fired, killing Brisbon. And only afterward did the officer discover
what had been inside Brisbon’s pocket: a prescription pill vial
containing Oxycodone pills. The original label had been scratched off.
There was no gun.

Crump said, as the Phoenix New Times reported,
the officer was in the right. Investigators did discover a
semiautomatic handgun and some marijuana inside the SUV. “Let’s be very
clear: The officer was doing what we expect him to do, and that is,
investigating crimes that neighbors are telling him are occurring in
that apartment complex. This one went bad, from the standpoint of how it
ended, but the officer was doing exactly what we want him to do.”

To
neighbors and Brisbon’s attorney, what happened was a little more
complicated. They say there was no drug deal — but a fast-food delivery.
And indeed, according
to the Arizona Republic, french fries were strewn outside the apartment
door. To them, it’s also unclear why the officer acted alone.

“I’m
not sure why a lone police officer would have felt the need to go in
there,” Kratter told The Post. “If the officer felt a pill bottle and
believed it was a butt of a handgun, it calls into question his
competence because I don’t know anyone who can mistake a plastic bottle
for a butt of a gun. How much larger is a gun than a pill bottle?”

The
officer was said to be distraught after the killing. Kratter, who
launched an investigation into the killing, said she spoke to one
neighbor who heard what had happened that night. “He didn’t near any
screaming or anything like that,” she said. “He heard what sounded like
scuffling, then gunshots, then the officer screaming, ‘F–k! F–k! F–k!’”

But
it was too late. Brisbon died there. “Who’s gonna argue with police?”
friend Brandon Dickerson, who had been with Brisbon, told the Arizona
Republic. “He had no death wish.”

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2) Officer Who Fatally Shot Tamir Rice Deemed Unfit for Duty in 2012
"Timothy Loehmann criticised by small Ohio force for breaking
down while handling live gun and his performance was called ‘dismal’,
records show"

Officer
Timothy Loehmann, who killed Tamir Rice on 22 November, was
specifically faulted for breaking down emotionally while handling a live
gun. During a training episode at a firing range, Loehmann was reported
to be “distracted and weepy” and incommunicative. “His handgun
performance was dismal,” deputy chief Jim Polak of the Independence,
Ohio, police department wrote in an internal memo.

The
memo concludes with a recommendation that Loehmann be “released from
the employment of the City of Independence”. Less than a week later, on 3
December 2012, Loehmann resigned.

In March of this
year, Loehmann was hired by the Cleveland police department. It is
unclear whether the department had seen the Independence memo at the
time of Loehmann’s hiring.

“I have not received any
instruction about it, and I have not received the file” from
Independence, said Sgt Ali Pillow, a Cleveland police spokesman. He said
the Cleveland department had not commented on whether it had seen the
memo from Independence before Loehmann was hired.

On a
Saturday afternoon last month, Loehmann and a partner, Frank Garmack,
were dispatched to Cleveland’s Cudell Commons Park after a 911 caller
reported “a guy” in the park was pointing a “probably fake” gun at
people. Surveillance video recovered after the incident showed Tamir
Rice, the 12-year-old, handling a pistol-sized pellet gun.

Loehmann
shot the boy dead within two seconds of a police car driven by Garmack
arriving to the park and pulling to a stop within feet of the child. In
the video, released by Cleveland police a week ago, Loehmann appears to fire his gun as he opens the door to leave the police car.

Loehmann has been taken off patrol duties in Cleveland and the shooting is under internal review.

The
Independence police memo describes an episode in which a supervising
officer suspended gun training with Loehmann after Loehmann had an
emotional breakdown about a girlfriend.

“During a
state range qualification course, Ptl Loehmann was distracted and
weepy,” Polak wrote, naming the trainer as Sgt Tinnirello. “[Loehmann]
could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts
nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal. Sgt
Tinnirello tried to work through this with Ptl Loehmann by giving him
some time. But, after some talking it was clear to Sgt Tinnirello that
the recruit was just not mentally prepared to be doing firearm training
...

“Ptl Loehmann continued with his emotional
meltdown to a point where Sgt Tinnirello could not take him into the
store, so they went to get something to eat and he continued to try and
calm Ptl Loehmann. Sgt Tinnirello describes the recruit as being very
downtrodden, melancholy with some light crying. Sgt Tinnirello later
found this emotional perplexity was due to a personal issue with Ptl
Loehmann’s on and off again girlfriend whom he was dealing with till
0400 hrs the night before. (Pti Loehmann was scheduled for 0800 the
morning in question).”

Some of the comments made by
Ptl Loehmann during this discourse were to the effect of, “I should have
gone to NY”, “maybe I should quit”, “I have no friends”, “I only hang
out with 73-year-old priests”, “I have cried every day for four months
about this girl.”

In recommending Loehmann’s
dismissal, Polak listed what he said were other performance
shortcomings, including Loehmann’s having left his gun unlocked, lied to
supervisors and failed to follow orders.

“Due to this
dangerous loss of composure during live range training and his
inability to manage this personal stress, I do not believe Ptl Loehmann
shows the maturity needed to work in our employment,” Polak concludes.
“For these reasons, I am recommending he be released from the employment
of the city of Independence. I do not believe time, nor training, will
be able to change or correct these deficiencies.”

One
route to justice for Eric Garner was blocked on Wednesday, by a Staten
Island grand jury’s confounding refusal to see anything potentially
criminal in the police assault that killed him.

But the
quest will continue. The fury that has prompted thousands to protest
peacefully across New York City, and the swift promise by the Justice
Department of a thorough investigation, may help ensure a just
resolution to this tragedy. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner
William Bratton, too, have vowed that necessary changes will come from
Mr. Garner’s death, promising that the Police Department will respond and improve itself, and redouble efforts to patrol communities in fairness and safety.

But
among the many needed reforms, there is one simple area that risks
being overlooked. Besides the banned chokehold used by Officer Daniel
Pantaleo, who brought Mr. Garner down, throwing a beefy arm around his
neck, there was lethal danger in the way Mr. Garner was subdued — on his
stomach, with a pile of cops on his back.

This breaks a
basic rule of safe arrests, especially for people who, like Mr. Garner,
are overweight and have medical problems like asthma. When the New York
medical examiner’s office ruled Mr. Garner’s death a homicide, it cited
“compression of neck (choke hold), compression of chest and prone
positioning during physical restraint by police.”

As early as 1995, a Department of Justice bulletin
on “positional asphyxia” quoted the New York Police Department’s
guidelines on preventing deaths in custody. “As soon as the subject is
handcuffed, get him off his stomach. Turn him on his side or place him
in a seated position.”

As Michael Baden, a former chief medical examiner of New York City, told The Times:
“Obese people especially, lying face down, prone, are unable to breathe
when enough pressure is put on their back. The pressure prevents the
diaphragm from going up and down, and he can’t inhale and exhale.”

Which is exactly what Mr. Garner was trying to tell the officers who were on top of him.

Mr.
Garner’s death recalls a similar tragedy involving a less familiar
name: Robert Ethan Saylor, a 26-year-old man with Down syndrome who was
killed last year in a struggle with three off-duty county sheriff’s
deputies at a movie theater in Frederick County, Md. Mr. Saylor was
overweight. The officers who killed him were just as inept as Officer
Pantaleo and his gang, though with one key difference: When they
realized that Mr. Saylor was in distress, they tried to save him. Still,
their efforts came too late, because mere moments in a facedown arrest
can be deadly.The Garner killing must lead to major changes in policy,
particularly in the use of “broken windows” policing — a strategy in
which Officer Pantaleo specialized, according to a report
in September by WNYC, which found that he had made hundreds of arrests
since joining the force in 2007, leading to at least 259 criminal cases,
all but a fraction of those involving petty offenses. The department
must find a better way to keep communities safe than aggressively
hounding the sellers of loose cigarettes.

And while
defenders of the police like to point to thousands of nonfatal
misdemeanor arrests as evidence that officers are acting in a way that
is reasonable and safe, there can never be a justification for any
lethal assault on an unarmed man, no justification for brutality.

The
outrage in New York, echoed by anguished protesters in Ferguson, Mo.,
and in Cleveland, where the Justice Department has found a pattern of excessive force by the police, is based on a genuine fear of aggressive, abusive cops.

The
results of such abuse can be seen in the final, quiet minutes of the
horrifying video of the Garner assault. This is well after the
chokehold, when Mr. Garner lies on the ground as officers and paramedics
— who were later disciplined for their behavior — ignore him and
bystanders ask: Why is no one giving him CPR?

This was
the point where Mr. Garner was dying, the victim of Officer Pantaleo,
but also of bad policy, poor training and heedlessness of the basics of
anatomy and breathing.

I
CAN recall it as if it were yesterday: looking into the toilet and
seeing blood instead of urine. That was the aftermath of my first police
encounter.

As a 15-year-old, living in South Jamaica,
Queens, I was arrested on a criminal trespass charge after unlawfully
entering and remaining in the home of an acquaintance. Officers took me
to the 103rd Precinct — the same precinct where an unarmed Sean Bell was
later shot and killed by the police — and brought me into a room in the
basement. They kicked me in the groin repeatedly. Out of every part of
my body, that’s what they targeted. Then I spent the night in Spofford
juvenile detention center.

For seven days after that, I
stared into the toilet bowl in my house at the blood I was urinating. I
kept telling myself that if it didn’t clear up by the next day, I would
share this shame and embarrassment with my mother, although I could
never bring myself to start that conversation. When clear urine
returned, I thought I was leaving that moment behind me. I never told
anyone this, not even my mother, until I was an adult.

As
I attempted to put that shame and attack on my manhood away, new horror
stories kept compelling me to relive those memories: the nightmare
experiences of Randolph Evans, Patrick Dorismond, Abner Louima and
countless other young men have reminded me of my own secret. Think of
all the secrets that young men of color are hiding. How many are
concealing some dark truth of the abuse they endured, and what is that
darkness doing to them?

In order to finally bring this
darkness into the light of day, our nation must address the foundation
of this crisis. That starts with acknowledging that the training taught
in police academies across the country is not being applied in
communities of color. After six months in the police academy, that
instruction is effectively wiped out by six days of being taught by
veteran cops on the streets.

I learned this myself
firsthand. I didn’t want any more children to go through what I endured,
so I sought to make change from the inside by joining the police
department.

Hours after coming out of the police
academy, I was told something as a new rookie officer: You’d rather be
tried by 12 jurors than carried by six pallbearers. In my impressionable
first days, I saw officers leave the precinct every day touching the
lockers of their fallen brothers. They started their shift on the
defensive, thinking about protecting themselves, as opposed to the
communities they served, regardless of the complexion of those
communities. One of my white fellow officers once told me that if he saw
a white individual with a gun, he took extra care for himself and the
individual. When he saw a black individual with a gun, he took care only
for himself.

These are the lessons to which I was
exposed, and the reality of what policing communities of color has been,
not just in New York City but across America. There is a legacy of
inequity that did not just appear overnight, but was carved into the
culture of law enforcement over decades.

There is
reluctance on the part of police leadership, which has long believed in
the nightstick and quick-trigger-finger justice, to effectively deal
with officers who have documented and substantiated records of abuse.
These individuals need to be removed from the force. That is an
essential component of the larger response we must have to address this
history of abuse.

We cannot continue to approach
policing in an antiquated fashion, and that certainly includes
technology. Technology has been used as a crime-fighting tactic, but not
as a tool to determine what happens during a police action. New York
City has taken the right step in putting body cameras on police
officers, but what about cameras on guns themselves? While I was a state
senator, I introduced a proposal to allow such devices, which would not
interfere with the function of the weapon; this proposal deserves to be
revisited. In fact, we can go further, with cameras on police vehicles
as well. Not only will technology shine a light on the darkness of these
police encounters, it will be significant in advancing community trust
that accountability does in fact apply.Equally important, especially in
the wake of what has taken place after the deaths of Michael Brown and
Eric Garner, is reform to our grand jury system. Grand juries were
established in England in the 12th and 13th centuries, a vestige of a
time when people needed to be protected from unfair prosecution from the
king and others. There was a necessary element of secrecy — one that
need not apply in cases involving police misconduct.

Open,
preliminary hearings in court can and should determine if a case should
be stepped up to a trial. Additionally, the handling of police
shootings should be wholly separated from local grand juries. These
bodies cannot handle cases involving local police officers on whom they
rely every day.

Special grand juries should be
convened for police-related incidents, and independent agencies must
gather evidence even before they convene, at the time of police
encounters where a death has occurred; the evidence gathered at that
moment is the evidence that will shape whether there is an indictment,
as well as whether there will be a fair trial based on the facts.

All
of these ideas need to be moved forward under the leadership of our
president, our governors, the mayors of our major cities and our law
enforcement leadership. If we fail to take advantage of this moment that
history has laid on our doorstep, we are doomed to more abuse, more
division and more chaos.

When my son was 15, he was
stopped by the police in a movie theater for no apparent reason. He
showed his ID and explained that his father was a retired police captain
and a state senator. The response was “So what?” It doesn’t and
shouldn’t matter who he is. He shouldn’t have had that experience at
all. And until that changes, for all men of color, real reform will
never come.

Eric L. Adams
is the Brooklyn borough president, a retired New York Police Department
captain and the co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.

The
country has historically reacted with doubt or indifference when
African-Americans speak of police officers who brutalize — or even kill —
people with impunity. Affluent and middle-class white Americans who
were treated with respect by the police had difficulty imagining the
often life-threatening mistreatment that black Americans of all walks of
life dealt with on a daily basis. Perhaps those days are passing away.

You
can see that from the multiracial cast of the demonstrations that have
swept the nation since Wednesday, when a grand jury decided not to
indict a white New York City police officer whose chokehold killed Eric
Garner, an unarmed black man.In city after city, white and nonwhite
citizens have surged through the streets chanting or bearing signs with
Mr. Garner’s final words: “I can’t breathe.” Others chanted: “Hands up;
don’t shoot” or “Black lives matter” — slogans from the racially
troubled town of Ferguson, Mo., where another grand jury declined to
indict the officer who shot to death 18-year-old Michael Brown.

The
viral spread of the demonstrations — and the wide cross section of
Americans who are organizing and participating in them — shows that what
was once seen as a black issue is on the way to being seen as a
central, American problem.

The question of the moment is whether
the country’s political leadership has the will to root out abusive and
discriminatory policing — corrosive, longstanding problems that bore
down on minority communities, large and small, urban and suburban.

The
scope of the problem is evident from the work of the Justice
Department, which has opened 20 investigations into local police
departments over the last five years and is currently enforcing reform
agreements with 15 departments, some of which were investigated in
previous administrations.

This week, Attorney General Eric Holder
Jr. released a particularly alarming report on the barbaric conduct of
the police department in Cleveland, which has been riven with discord in
recent weeks, after a white police officer shot and killed a
12-year-old black boy, Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun.

The
Times reported on Friday that the officer had quit a suburban police
force after his supervisors judged that he had a “dangerous loss of
composure” during firearms training and was emotionally unprepared to
deal with the stresses of the job. The Cleveland Police Department had
failed to examine the officer’s work history before hiring him. Thus an
officer who had been unable to cope in a suburban district was given the
power of life and death over people in a big city, where the task of
policing the streets is far more demanding.

The Justice Department report
describes the Cleveland Police Department as something far closer to an
occupying military force than a legitimate law enforcement agency. The
officers, for example, seem to take a casual view of the use of deadly
force, shooting at people who pose no threat of harm to the police or
others. In one case in 2013, for example, they actually fired at a
victim who had been held captive in a house — as he escaped, clad only
in boxer shorts.

The report cataloged numerous incidents of
wanton violence, with officers beating, pepper-spraying and Tasering
people who were unarmed or had already been restrained. Officers
escalated encounters with citizens instead of defusing them, making
force all but inevitable.The record in Cleveland is extreme. But aspects
of illegal police conduct can be found in cities all over the country,
subjecting millions to intimidation and fear that they could be killed
for innocent actions.

Congress will have an opportunity to discuss this issue soon, during the Senate confirmation hearings
of Loretta Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District
of New York, who has been nominated to succeed Mr. Holder as attorney
general.

Ms. Lynch’s office will oversee the federal civil rights
investigation into the Garner case. Some in Congress clearly understand
that the grand jury’s failure to indict the officer — despite a clear
video showing him choking the man — deserves review, not just on its
face, but because it goes to the heart of the fundamental rights
guaranteed by the Constitution.

Others, however, seem poised to
argue that the federal government, which has a clear responsibility to
enforce civil rights laws, should not be taking the lead. Senator John
Cornyn, Republican of Texas, for example, asked, “Why does the federal
government feel like it is its responsibility and role to be the leader
in an investigation in a local instance?” That sounds like something out
of the Jim Crow era, when Southern states argued that they were
entitled to treat black citizens any way they wished.

Mr. Holder
was on the mark when he said that the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric
Garner and Tamir Rice raised urgent, national questions about the
breakdown of trust between minority communities and the police forces
that are supposed to serve and protect them.

That so many are in
the streets protesting police abuse shows that outrage over these
injustices is spreading. Now it is up to the nation’s political leaders
to confront this crisis.

FERGUSON,
Mo. — In the decade that Ashley Bernaugh, who is white, has been with
her black husband, her family in Indiana has been so smitten with him
that she teases them that they love him more than her.

So Ms.
Bernaugh was somewhat surprised by her family’s reaction after Darren
Wilson, a white police officer here, killed Michael Brown, an unarmed
black teenager. Forced into more frank discussions about race with her
family than ever before, Ms. Bernaugh, 29, said her relatives seemed
more outraged by the demonstrations than the killing, which she saw as
an injustice.

“They don’t understand it’s as prevalent as it is,”
Ms. Bernaugh said, referring to racial discrimination. “It’s just
disappointing to think that your family wants to pigeonhole a whole race
of people, buy into the rhetoric that, ‘Oh, these are violent
protests.’ ”It is as if Ms. Bernaugh, a nonprofit organizer living in
the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, is straddling two worlds. In one,
her black mother-in-law is patting her on the back, saying she is proud
of her for speaking out against Mr. Brown’s killing. In the other, her
white family and friends are telling her to quiet down because “you
don’t know the whole picture.”

Race has never been an easy topic
of conversation in America. But the recent high-profile deaths of black
people at the hands of police officers in Ferguson, New York, Cleveland and elsewhere — and the nationwide protests
those deaths spurred — have exposed sharp differences about race
relations among friends, co-workers, neighbors and even relatives in
unexpected and often uncomfortable ways.

Put bluntly, many people say, they feel they are being forced to pick a team.

In
interviews here and around the country, both blacks and whites
described tense conversations in office cubicles or across dinner tables
about the killings and subsequent protests. Many described being
surprised to learn, often on social media, about the opinions — and
stereotypes — held by family and friends about people of other races. In
some cases, those relationships have fractured, in person and online.

Kenny
Hargrove, a black man from Brooklyn married to a white woman, said he
and his wife confronted one of his in-laws for posting a racially
insensitive meme on Facebook around the time Mr. Brown was killed. The
relative was so upset that she unfriended them. Now, she is trying to
mend fences and has sent a new friend request. But Mr. Hargrove, 36,
said he was torn about whether to hit “confirm.”

“If I see one stupid thing from you, it’s over forever,” Mr. Hargrove said.

In
fact, the day that a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict a
police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, Mr. Hargrove
posted this to his Facebook page: “This is for anyone still left on my
friends list who’s wondering why black people are so angry right now. If
you still don’t get it, if you still can’t see the pattern, if you
still think the protests are nothing more than angry thugs who just want
free TVs, let me know. I don’t have the energy to connect the dots for
you, but I do have just enough left to hit ‘unfriend.’ ”

But
Peter Weiss, a white resident of Staten Island, said many black people
seem unwilling to consider alternative perspectives on police violence.

To
illustrate his point, Mr. Weiss, 41, described an encounter on
Wednesday at Karl’s Klipper, a bar and restaurant in Staten Island, when
news flashed on a television screen that the grand jury had decided not
to indict. An African-American whom he was friendly with walked over
and called him a redneck, Mr. Weiss said.

The acquaintance was
normally calm, kind and sensitive, but the news had set him off, Mr.
Weiss said. The exchange solidified his belief that people were reaching
conclusions about current events based on past racism that, in his
view, no longer exists.

“Blacks and whites, we don’t hate
anymore, there is no real racism anymore for anything real, like who can
get a job,” he said. “Honestly, people are so stuck on the past, people
need to grow up.”

Attitudes like that are why David Odom
believes that race relations have deteriorated amid the recent police
killings, and why he avoids talking to white people about sensitive
racial topics. Blacks and whites come from different experiences, so
reconciling their world views is too difficult, he said.

Mr.
Odom, 50, a black lawyer living in the affluent, mostly white Chicago
suburb of Naperville, recalled trying to explain to a close white friend
why he thought the grand jury process in Mr. Brown’s case was racist.

“He
didn’t believe it because, in his mind, he believed that the judicial
system isn’t rigged,” Mr. Odom said. “He believed that the judicial
system and the criminal justice system generally is fair, and I don’t.
There’s a chasm between us.”

A black infantry lieutenant in Texas
said he is generally hawkish about foreign policy and conservative on
the economy. So some of his white Army colleagues were surprised to hear
his reaction to the non-indictment in the Garner case.

Several
people came into his office the day it was announced and said, “Can you
believe these idiots in New York protesting?” said the lieutenant,
Christopher, who asked that his last name be withheld because he was not
authorized to speak to the news media. His response, he said, was, “Can
you believe these idiots didn’t hand out an indictment?”

He got awkward looks in response. “A lot of people at work, they have no idea how to respond to me right now,” he said.

Divisions
over the killings are not simply black and white. They also run along
generational, socioeconomic and geographical lines. Whites have joined
blacks in street protests here and across the nation against police
violence. And some blacks have joined whites in raising concerns about
the behavior of blacks.Still, in Ferguson, some whites said they felt
like blacks had rushed to judgment in condemning them as bigots.

In
Old Ferguson, where the police station is, a group of mostly black
demonstrators marched down the street one recent, frigid evening,
chanting angry slogans, and as they came upon Marley’s Bar and Grill, a
line of police officers quickly formed between them and the
establishment. The patrons inside were mostly white, and demonstrators
stood outside yelling at them. When protesters peered in through a
window and took pictures, some of the patrons pulled down a shade.

“We
were told many times we were going to burn to the ground because we
were white owners,” said Kelly Braun, 48, who owns the corner bar with
her husband. “They yell stuff at us.”

Ms. Braun said her bar
usually hosts a diverse crowd. But many black patrons have stayed away
recently, dismayed over some of the actions on the street, she said.

“I’ve had so many apologies from different people — it’s because they’re embarrassed,” she said.

For
some black business owners in Ferguson, the calculation about the
protesters’ demands and the community’s well-being is a more complicated
one.

Cathy Jenkins, who owns Cathy’s Kitchen with her husband,
has experienced the wrath of angry demonstrations — someone threw a
chair through one of her restaurant’s windows the night the grand jury
decision in the Brown case was announced. But she has also experienced
racism: Someone has been calling the restaurant regularly and repeating
the N-word when the phone is answered.

Not surprisingly, she was
torn about the reaction, sometimes violent, to the Brown killing. “I
don’t want the community torn up, but I believe in standing up for your
rights when it’s something that’s just,” she said.

Montague
Simmons expected resistance last month when he and 20 other people
slipped into the election night party of the newly elected St. Louis
County executive, Steve Stenger, to protest Mr. Stenger’s support of
Robert P. McCulloch, the prosecutor who many Brown supporters said
mishandled the grand jury investigation of Mr. Wilson. But Mr. Simmons, a
black union organizer, said he never thought the stiffest opposition
would come from people he considered close allies.

As several
demonstrators clustered to begin chanting, Mr. Simmons said, some white
union members joined in trying to block them, while also identifying
them to the police. These were the same white union members, Mr. Simmons
said, whom he had worked with to advocate for things like raising the
minimum wage and protecting collective bargaining rights.

“In any
other setting, any other fight over the last two or three years, we’d
be shoulder to shoulder,” Mr. Simmons said. “When it comes to race, all
of a sudden that’s not the case.”

Reporting was contributed
by Nate Schweber and Mosi Secret from New York, and Manny Fernandez,
Mitch Smith, Monica Davey and Campbell Robertson from Ferguson.

ERIC
GARNER was not the first American to be choked by the police, and he
will not be the last, thanks to legal rules that prevent victims of
police violence from asking federal courts to help stop deadly
practices.

The 1983 case City of Los Angeles v. Lyons vividly
illustrates the problem. That case also involved an African-American man
choked by the police without provocation after he was stopped for a
minor offense — a burned-out taillight. Unlike Mr. Garner, Adolph Lyons
survived the chokehold. He then filed a federal lawsuit, asking the city
to compensate him for his injuries. But he wanted more than just money.
He also asked the court to prevent the Los Angeles Police Department
from using chokeholds in the future. The trial court ordered the
L.A.P.D. to stop using chokeholds unless an officer was threatened with
death or serious injury, and to institute better training, reporting and
record-keeping.The Supreme Court overturned this order by one vote. The
court explained that Mr. Lyons would have needed to prove that he
personally was likely to be choked again in order for his lawsuit to be a
vehicle for systemic reform. Without that, he could win compensation
only for past injuries.

This is the legal standard when a
plaintiff asks a federal court for an injunction — or a forward-looking
legal order — in order to stop illegal practices that could harm him in
the future. It makes some sense in the abstract: If someone can’t show
he will be harmed in the future, why should a court try to prevent the
harm? But even though Mr. Lyons couldn’t prove that the L.A.P.D. would
choke him again, he could be confident that the police would eventually
choke someone else. When the stakes are this deadly, federal courts
should step in.

The decision instead left it to local authorities
to enact solutions. History shows they’re not up to the job. In 1985,
the New York Police Department agreed that chokeholds were “potentially
lethal and unnecessary” and announced that it would no longer use them
“routinely.” That policy failed. After more deadly chokeholds,
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly banned their use altogether in 1993. But
just last year, the city received 233 allegations of police chokeholds.

Federal
courts could address police violence by legally forbidding practices
like chokeholds, as well as by mandating improved training and
reporting. If police departments still failed to comply, federal judges
could impose penalties and harsher requirements.

How do we know
that these interventions would be more effective? Consider school
segregation. Local officials had promised change but failed to ensure
it, and it took decades of close supervision by federal courts to make a
dent in the problem. As the courts started to leave this field in more
recent years, de facto segregation returned.

In his dissent in
the Lyons case, Justice Thurgood Marshall pointed out that, without
judicial enforcement, the city would “continue the policy indefinitely
as long as it is willing to pay damages for the injuries and deaths that
result.” Today we still depend on bureaucratic cost-benefit analysis,
with cities weighing the cost of compensating victims against the
perceived value of aggressive policing.

Unfortunately, the
hurdles to winning compensation are also severe. To get money from
police officers who act illegally, victims must prove not just that a
practice is illegal, but that no reasonable officer would think the
practice was legal. To get money from a local government, a victim must
prove that his injury was part of a pattern or policy. On the rare
occasions when victims do prevail, governments can afford the costs and
have little incentive to reform.To be sure, there are still ways that
federal courts can address the Garner case. The Justice Department has
announced that it will conduct a federal civil rights investigation, as
it did in Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo. But the Justice
Department has limited resources and fluctuating political will.
Protests help bolster this will. But the Justice Department cannot
notice (let alone investigate) every allegation of police violence.
Citizens need to be able to instigate judicial reform on their own.

Some
federal judges have recently acted boldly to allow these suits despite
the Lyons precedent. For example, in last year’s N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk
decision, the judge found that discriminatory police searches were
pervasive enough to issue an injunction in a case brought by past
victims.

Public indignation about police violence should be
directed not only at the grand juries and prosecutors that fail to
vindicate victims of police violence, but also at the legal rules that
enabled this violence in the first place. The law shouldn’t just serve
to punish past conduct: It should also drive reform.

Shakeer Rahman and Sam Barr are third-year students at Harvard Law School.

MEXICO
CITY — At least one of 43 students missing since September has been
identified among remains largely burned to ashes, family members and a
federal official said Saturday, adding considerable weight to a theory by prosecutors that the students were killed after being abducted by municipal police and turned over to a drug gang.

The
federal attorney general’s office scheduled a news conference Sunday to
announce the discovery, which has yet to be declared officially.
However, an official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said one set
of remains matched a student, and family members of other students said
they were told the same at a late-night meeting Friday with Argentine
forensic investigators assisting the Mexican government with the
case.The plight of the students has shaken the country for weeks and
exposed the deep links between many local officials and organized-crime
gangs. The case has helped push President Enrique Peña Nieto’s
approval ratings to the lowest of his two-year tenure — the lowest of
any Mexican president in nearly two decades. The pressure has forced him
to make security and policing a top priority over the economic moves he
has favored.

Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam had said on
Nov. 7 that some gang members in custody had described in detail the
abduction of the students from a rural teachers college in southwest Mexico
after a protest in the town of Iguala. Those witnesses said the police,
infiltrated by gang members and working at the behest of a mayor with
gang ties, turned over the students to the gang, which killed them and
burned their remains in a garbage dump. The remains were then placed in
garbage bags and tossed into and along the banks of a river.

But
family members had insisted authorities continue the search, in the hope
that the students could be alive, and tens of thousands of people have
taken to the streets in a series of marches across the country —
including one Saturday in Mexico City — and some cities abroad with
demands to resolve the case and fix a Mexico that they feel is riddled
with corruption and organized-crime violence.

The news of the
identification of the student came as a shock to family members, who
have maintained a vigil at the school in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, an hour’s
drive from Acapulco, and have expressed deep mistrust of the authorities
and the way they have been conducting the investigation. Families have
clung to hope as well as occasional rumors of the students’ being held
alive in a cave, a warehouse or in the hills, with only a few accepting
the prospect of their deaths.

“Imagine how we feel, we have kept
the hope that they were alive, and then this announcement came,”
Ernestina Jacinto, the mother of Israel Jacinto, 19, one of the missing
students, said in a soft, exhausted voice.

“What hurts the most
is that they were so young, and they did not deserve the death they
got,” she said, adding that she did not have the strength to attend
Saturday’s march in Mexico City as she absorbed the news. “No mother can
imagine her own son is dead.”

She said members of the Argentine
forensic team, who could not be reached for comment, told the families
that it may be difficult to make further identifications because the
remains, reduced to ash and bone fragments, are in a condition that
challenged even the high-tech laboratory at the University of Innsbruck
in Austria that analyzed them and has a reputation for handling the most
difficult cases.

Speaking after a mass march on Saturday in
Mexico City, Felipe de la Cruz, the father of a missing student and a
spokesman for the families, said the student was Alexander Mora, as
other family members also said they were told.

“We won’t cry for
you Alexander,” he told thousands gathered at the monument to the
revolution in the heart of the city. “Your downfall will flourish in the
revolution. Know wherever you are that we are going to do justice.”

He said the families would continue to press for a search for the other students until all are confirmed dead or found alive.

Animal Politico, a news site, said Mr. Mora was 19 years old and longed to be a teacher, according to his father.

“Nobody
could take that idea from him,” the news site quoted his father as
saying. “We are farmers, and he would help us in the fields, but he
wanted to study.”

The case of the missing students, who attended a
college steeped in leftist political thought and given to rowdy,
disruptive protests, has already led to the resignation of the governor
of the state where it occurred, Guerrero, and to the arrest of dozens of
people, including the mayor of Iguala and his wife.

The
authorities have said the mayor prompted the abduction by ordering the
police to round up the students before they could disrupt a speech his
politically aspiring wife was giving. The students had gone to Iguala to
steal buses for transportation to a coming demonstration, a common
practice of theirs that has perplexed and sometimes angered officials.

Mr. Peña Nieto last week unveiled a series of proposals
that would essentially do away with most municipal police in Mexico and
turn over public safety to larger state police departments, though
several analysts have said the moves did not go far enough and
sidestepped other changes in the judicial system that could confront the
lawlessness evident in many pockets of the country.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

9) Shielding Children From Talk of Ferguson and Garner Cannot Protect Them
By Rachel Swarns

We were driving to Whole Foods on a blustery evening
last month when my 7-year-old son asked me the question: “Can a police
officer be arrested?”

Of course, I told him, as I navigated
through the slushy parking lot. I reminded him about the Revolutionary
War and the founding of our nation. We talked about the courts and the
law. In America, I assured him, no one — not the police, not even the
president — is above the law.

Then my heart started pounding: Why was he asking? Had he heard the news somehow?

I
had rushed to turn off the radio that morning before he sat down for
his bowl of oatmeal. I had snatched up the newspapers so he wouldn’t see
the front-page headlines. I had done everything I could to keep him
from hearing about Ferguson, Mo., but it hadn’t been enough.

Sitting
in the newsroom last week, my mind went back to that moment. A Staten
Island grand jury had just declined to bring charges in the case of Eric
Garner, the unarmed black man who died after a police officer placed
him in a chokehold. And as I looked around my office, I felt suddenly
and keenly aware that these cases weigh on me in a way that is
unimaginable to many of my white colleagues.

They weigh on me and
on many black parents, regardless of our station in life, regardless of
how high we have climbed in our careers. When we hear about them, we
think about our sons, and we feel vulnerable, even fearful. We worry
that despite our degrees, despite our credentials, we will not be able
to protect our boys from the indignities and dangers they may encounter
at the hands of police.

Does it surprise you that a professional
black woman should live with such anxieties in 2014? I have a master’s
degree, a good job and a good salary. My husband and I own a comfortable
home in New Jersey.

But I know what you may not: That black men —
young and old — cannot assume that the police will treat them with the
respect and courtesy that white professionals often take for granted.

Ask Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who said earlier this year
that he had been stopped and questioned by the police in Washington,
“while I was running to catch a movie, even though I happened to be a
federal prosecutor.”

Ask United States Senator Cory A. Booker of New Jersey, who as a young man was stopped and detained
by six police officers, with guns drawn. At the time, he was a newly
selected Rhodes Scholar who had just graduated from Stanford University.

Or
talk to Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor who was arrested
in 2009 at his own home in Cambridge, Mass., by a police officer
investigating a burglary.

It is true that Mr. Brown and Mr.
Garner had been breaking the law when they encountered the police. (Mr.
Brown had stolen cigarillos from a corner store and Mr. Garner was
selling loose cigarettes.) So some readers may try to reassure me: “If
your son steers clear of trouble, you’ll have nothing to fear.”

Such
advice is small comfort, though, to those of us familiar with police
fatalities in New York City. Among the dead are Anthony Baez, Amadou
Diallo, Ousmane Zongo, Timothy Stansbury Jr. and Akai Gurley, men slain
by police officers even though they had not committed a crime.

I
was born and raised in this city. The spot on Victory Boulevard and Bay
Street where Mr. Garner died is walking distance from my parents’ home.
I have relatives who lived in public housing and I know how often
people take the stairs, instead of unreliable elevators, just like Mr.
Gurley, who stepped into the wrong stairwell at the wrong time and got
killed by a police officer’s bullet on Nov. 20.

So I nodded when
Mayor Bill de Blasio described how he and his wife, who is
African-American, have worried about the dangers their son, Dante, might
face at the hands of the police.

And I understood why Patrick
Gaspard, the United States ambassador to South Africa, felt compelled to
chime in about the Garner case, too, tweeting: “I just told my son that
His Life Matters.”

This is not normal life for most of my
colleagues. But for many black people, this is our normal. Sometimes, I
rage about it. Mostly, it just breaks my heart.

Because I want to
talk to my little boy about his mean left-footed soccer kick, about his
musings on the Big Bang and his dreams of discovering dinosaur bones in
the backyard.

He already knows about slavery, about that night
at the Lorraine Motel in 1968 and about discrimination, past and
present. My husband and I had hoped that a conversation about the
dangers and humiliations that young African-American men still sometimes
face — that he might someday face — in their encounters with police
could wait.

But on that snowy night, when my 7-year-old asked
about Ferguson, I knew what had to come. “It’s complicated, sweetheart,”
I told him. And we started to talk.

When
a grand jury on Staten Island declined, on Wednesday, to indict Officer
Daniel Pantaleo in the killing of Eric Garner, some critics blamed
Staten Island itself, easily equating it with a culture of police
coddling and conservatism. But grand juries, so willing to issue
indictments in so many instances, rarely do so in cases involving police
officers who have killed civilians. And they have failed to do so in
far more liberal environments — in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

The
year 1999 was a horrific one for police shootings in New York City. On
Feb. 4, Amadou Diallo was killed in the doorway of a Bronx apartment
building after the police, mistakenly believing he was reaching into his
pocket for a gun, fired 41 shots. Several months later, at the end of
August, Gidone Busch,
a mentally disturbed Orthodox Jewish man, was shot a dozen times in
Borough Park in Brooklyn by four police officers, after he struck one on
the arm with a hammer. A few days later, in September, an unarmed man
named Richard Watson was fatally shot by the police in Harlem after he
fled on foot in the wake of an accusation that he had evaded a taxi
fare.

Mr. Watson’s death represented the fifth fatal shooting by
police officers in four weeks. The new millennium would get underway
with the killing of Patrick Dorismond
in March 2000 after an undercover narcotics agent shot him outside a
Midtown Manhattan bar; he too was without a weapon. None of the police
officers involved in the Busch, Watson or
Dorismond cases faced criminal charges. Officers in the Diallo case
were acquitted. Thirteen years after the shooting, the Police Department
gave one of them, Kenneth Boss, the right to use his gun again.

In
the current moment, police violence, like campus sexual assault, seems
to be in a pandemic phase. Last month, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation reported that 461 felony suspects had been killed by
police officers across the country last year, the highest figure in two
decades. We are possibly, if not surely, experiencing a crisis of
manhood in which the young respond to their fears in a time of rising
insecurity with a concomitant blast of brutality. Darren Wilson, who
shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Officer Pantaleo; and Peter Laing,
the police officer who killed Akai Gurley last month in the Pink Houses
in Brooklyn, are all in their 20s.

Whatever the collective psychological causes, it is almost certain that the absence of real repercussions impedes restraint.

“If
you believe in deterrence theory,” as Jeffrey A. Fagan, a Columbia
University law professor who specializes in policing, put it to me,
“then you believe that people will refrain from wrongdoing if they
believe that punishment is real. But the legal system is incapable of
creating the same kind of deterrent effects for police officers.” Right
now, there would appear to be no obvious downside to the use of
excessive force beyond personal upset and dislocation.

Apart from
that are the broad latitude and deference that prosecutors give police
officers in these cases. “The way the questioning often goes, it allows
the officer to set forward a narrative that gives a series of
justifications for his actions,” Professor Fagan said. That narrative
has to be challenged, and in many cases it isn’t.

As anyone who
has watched “Law & Order” knows, the relationship between police
officers and prosecutors is typically steeped in fealty, which is why
advocates of police reform have called for independent prosecutors to be
assigned to cases involving potential criminal misconduct on the part
of the police.“Is there hand-in-hand complicity? I believe there is,”
Jeffry L. Emdin told me. Mr. Emdin, a former assistant district attorney
in the Bronx, represented the family of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed
teenager who was shot and killed by a police officer, Richard Haste, two
years ago. “The district attorney’s office works daily with members of
the N.Y.P.D.,” Mr. Emdin said. “I’ve had A.D.A.s vouch for the
credibility of officers coming under civil rights violations,” he told
me, referring to prosecutors who could be expected to bring charges.

In
one instance he had a client who alleged that a police officer broke
his nose in a precinct house. “The D.A.'s office said, ‘No, no, he
couldn’t have done that.’ ”

The city believes that requiring
police officers to wear cameras, a program that is to begin immediately,
will help reduce instances of transgression. It’s hard to absorb the
logic of that after the Garner decision, given that the existence of a
video demonstrating the use of a chokehold on Mr. Garner failed to
persuade the grand jury that Officer Pantaleo’s actions even demanded a
criminal trial.

In a television appearance on Wednesday night,
the city’s public advocate, Letitia James, called upon Gov. Andrew M.
Cuomo to push for independent prosecutors in these cases. Asked about
this the next day, Governor Cuomo, whose initial response
to the Garner decision was relatively dispassionate, deflected. “I
think we should look at the whole system,” he said. “I don’t think
there’s any one answer.”

Michael Brown’s family, on the night of the Ferguson grand jury decision, called for all police in the United States to wear body cameras.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in announcing that some of New York’s police officers would begin wearing them, said “body cameras are one of the ways to create a real sense of transparency and accountability.”

And
on Monday, President Obama said he would request $75 million in federal
funds to distribute 50,000 body cameras to police departments
nationwide, saying they would improve police relations with the public.

But
even as departments have started adopting the technology, questions
remain about how much it can actually prevent violent encounters with
citizens or clarify the boundaries of appropriate police response.No
consensus has emerged about when officers should turn on their cameras,
which could leave departments open to accusations of selective
recording. And tapes do not always lead to universally shared
conclusions. The footage of Eric Garner’s death this year on Staten Island and of Rodney G. King’s beating
by Los Angeles officers in 1991 ultimately revealed the shortcomings of
video as evidence, even as they thrust violence against unarmed black
men into the public eye.

So while video offers the illusion of
absolute truth, police officials and legal experts say, it can just as
often turn into a Rorschach test.

“We shouldn’t just think of
video as the safeguard of truth — ‘Now we have incontrovertible evidence
of the truth of what happened,’ ” said Mary D. Fan, a criminal law
professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former
federal prosecutor. “It isn’t necessarily the magic bullet, that now we
know the truth and that we’ll all agree, we’ll see the same thing and
agree on the same thing.”

Body cameras have already played a role
in a few police disciplinary cases. In Phoenix, for example, an officer
was fired after his camera captured him in repeated instances of
profanity, verbal abuse and threats against civilians.

In other
cases it was the absence of video that got the officer in trouble. An
officer in Daytona Beach, Fla., was forced to resign after he was caught
turning off his camera at critical moments. An Albuquerque officer who
shot and killed a woman in April — and whose camera was off at the time —
was fired on Monday after being investigated for not complying with
department orders that required officers to record all interactions with
civilians.

But even when video does exist, it is often not
decisive. In the case of Mr. Garner, the Staten Island man who died in
July after a police officer put him in a chokehold, a video of the
encounter taken with a bystander’s cellphone and viewed millions of
times was enough to stir visceral outrage — but not to secure an
indictment.

“I don’t know what video they were looking at,” said
Gwen Carr, Mr. Garner’s mother, referring to the grand jury that cleared
the officer, on Wednesday. “Evidently it wasn’t the same one that the
rest of the world was looking at.”

Many of those who poured out
to demonstrate after the Garner decision thought, as Greg Jackson, 25, a
law student from Oakland, Calif., did, that the video would make an
indictment “a slam dunk.”

But slam dunks are rare.

In the beating of Mr. King, the Los Angeles officers involved were acquitted
despite a video, shot by a nearby resident, showing them repeatedly
kicking and hitting him with batons. In the case that inspired the film “Fruitvale Station,” the transit officer who fatally shot Oscar Grant III in Oakland, Calif., in 2009 was found guilty
of involuntary manslaughter, a lesser verdict than many protesters had
called for after cellphone video of Mr. Grant’s death circulated online.

For
one thing, jurors are often sympathetic to police arguments. The
officers charged with beating Mr. King after a car chase argued that he
was uncooperative and making movements they deemed potentially
threatening. (Two of the four acquitted officers were later convicted in
federal court of violating Mr. King’s civil rights.)

And police
have some latitude to use force when making an arrest. Daniel Pantaleo,
the officer who applied the chokehold to Eric Garner, narrated three
videos taken of the encounter while testifying before the grand jury,
saying he intended only to wrestle Mr. Garner to the ground.

Confronted
with a video, the police usually “have a version that seeks to explain
what you see, not necessarily to contradict what you see, but to explain
it,” said John Burris, an Oakland-based civil rights lawyer who worked
on the King and Grant cases.

The potential for officers to tailor
their testimony to video evidence highlights an ongoing debate over the
extent to which police should have control of or access to the videos
taken by their body cameras.The majority of police chiefs surveyed last
year by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit police research
and policy organization, said they supported allowing officers to
review videos before making statements. In New York, Police Commissioner
William J. Bratton said officers will have the same opportunity.

Rules
about when officers should activate their cameras vary. Some
departments have no written policy, according to the Police Executive
Research Forum’s report. A common approach requires recording when
responding to 911 calls and any situation that might involve criminal
enforcement. Officers have the discretion to turn their cameras off
under most policies, the report said, but must explain their decision in
writing or on camera.

The concern is that “they’ll be selective,
that there will be Watergate gaps in the record,” said Donna Lieberman,
executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “There have
to be mechanisms to ensure against that.”

The New York Police
Department has yet to finalize its policy, though officials said the
current draft calls for officers to record in seven instances, which
include arrests and any use of force. Interior patrols in housing
projects were added to the list after an officer shot and killed an
unarmed black man in a housing project stairwell in Brooklyn last month.

When
it comes to enforcing the policies, “the implications for legitimacy
are going to be pretty profound,” said Michael White, the author of a
Department of Justice study on police body cameras. “If you have a
police encounter that results in a citizen’s death, and it was supposed
to be recorded and it wasn’t, you can imagine what the citizens’
reaction would be.”

Cities are moving forward with camera
programs even in the absence of much evidence of their benefits: Only
three studies have been conducted on them in the United States, Mr.
White said, though they have been promising.

In Rialto, Calif.;
Mesa, Ariz.; and Phoenix, the use of force and civilian complaints
against officers when they wore cameras decreased. But Mr. White
cautioned: “We have no idea what the dynamics are that are leading to
those reductions.”

In the Garner case, Officer Pantaleo’s lawyer,
Stuart London, said his client believed he was in the right, so it did
not bother him that he was being filmed.

“I expect everything to be filmed,” he said the officer told the grand jury.

The
marches in the streets are not done. The die-ins disrupting traffic are
not done. Any kind of closure for the families of Michael Brown, Eric
Garner, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, and so many others is far from done. So
why should anyone be surprised that the St. Louis Rams were not done? A
week after five players raised their arms in the now iconic protest
pose of "hands up don't shoot," wide receiver Kenny Britt took the field
with the names “Michael Brown” and “Trayvon Martin” written on his
cleats. His teammate Jared Cook had the words "I can't breathe," the
last gasp of Staten Island's Eric Garner as a police officer cut off his
oxygen with a chokehold, written on his wristband. Teammate Davin
Joseph had the same phrase written on his cleats.

They were not alone. Detroit Lions running back Reggie Bush, who was attacked by Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League
for comparing the late Michael Brown’s hometown of Ferguson to Gaza on
Instagram, was not cowed into silence and wore a shirt that read “I
can't breathe” during warm-ups. He said, "Honestly, I've always been the
quiet kid. I've always been the one who's reserved, to kind of sit back
and not really get into politics and things like that. But I don't know
why I just felt some kind of ... I guess the situation just touched
me."

Bush's mom has also been a police offer for twenty years,
and yes I wish I could be a fly on the wall at the Bush house this
Christmas.

Browns cornerback Johnson Bademosi also wore an "I
can't breathe" shirt before game-time, as did San Diego Chargers
linebacker Melvin Ingram. Then there was Brandian Ross of the Raiders,
who came out during player introductions without a helmet and with his
hands up high, and Washington defensive lineman Chris Baker, who raised
his hands up after a sack. Although, in Baker's case, the gesture of
anti-racism while wearing a Redskins uniform probably won't make it onto
a protest poster anytime soon.

These actions by NFL players
come the day after NBA star Derrick Rose wore an "I can't breathe" shirt
during warm-ups, which prompted the NBA's number one icon, LeBron
James,to say, "I thought it was great. I'm looking for one."

Then there is All-Star guard Damian Lillard who posted this gut-punch of a political cartoonby Rik Sansone to his Instagram account, causing the image to go viral among sports fans and protesters alike.

Two members of the Oregon Ducks basketball team also raised their hands up during the pledge of allegiance the week after Knox College basketball player Ariyana Smith,
playing near Ferguson in Claremont, Missouri, lay on the floor of the
court and would not move for four and a half minutes, to represent the
four and a half hours that Michael Brown was left in the street after
dying at the hands of Darren Wilson.

Each of these actions has
the effect of amplifying the impact of a new struggle for human dignity
in the face of racism. It has has found expression in all fifty states
and in solidarity actions in cities around the world all with the
message that black lives matter. Seeing the movement impinge upon the
highly sanitized, deeply authoritarian world of sports is not only a
reflection of just how widespread the outpouring of anger has been.
These athletic protests also shape the movement, giving more people the
confidence to get in the streets and puncturing the self-imposed bubbles
of those who want to pretend that all is well in the world. It is
politicizing sports fans and educating those who think that sports in
general—and athletes in particular—have nothing to offer the struggle
for a better world.

Yes, it is also provoking a great deal of
ugliness among a segment of fans on social media, not to mention snide
smirks from some sports writers who once a year find time to praise
people like Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Arthur Ashe, and others tucked
away in the past. They should listen to Lions coach Jim Caldwell, one of
only four African-American head coaches in the NFL. When asked about
his players getting political the normally taciturn Caldwell said:

I grew up in the 60s, where everybody was socially
conscious. I believe in it. I'd be a hypocrite if I stood up here and
told you any differently, because more than likely, some of those
protests that Dr (Martin Luther) King and some of the others that took a
part in non-violent protests, is the reason why I'm standing here in
front of you today.

This is a similar moment. Except this movement is not only explicitly
about the right to live a life with more opportunity, but the right to
simply live. As Howard Zinn said, "You can't be neutral on a moving
train." The train is leaving the station, even in the world of sports.

The circumstances of the case, like others before it and others that would follow, in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island,
were familiar. A police officer killed an unarmed man. The officer
claimed he acted appropriately. A grand jury declined to bring charges.

But the state’s case in Charlotte, N.C., against Officer Randall Kerrick,
would not end there. The state attorney general’s office, which
inherited the case after the local prosecutor recused himself, quickly
resubmitted the case to a different grand jury.

Evidence was reheard. Twice as many as witnesses were called. And in January, the second grand jury indicted Officer Kerrick on charges of voluntary manslaughter in the death of Jonathan Ferrell,
24, a former college football player.The extraordinary steps taken in
North Carolina — along with the recent grand jury decisions to bring no
charges against white police officers who killed unarmed black men in
New York and Missouri — illustrate how the justice system can favor the
police, often shielding them from murder or serious manslaughter
charges.

The balance tips toward the police from the start: In
most felony cases, an arrest is made and a grand jury indictment follows
within a prescribed period of time. But in police fatality cases,
prosecutors generally use special grand juries sitting for lengthy
periods to investigate and gather evidence before determining if an
arrest and indictment are warranted.

Another hurdle is the law
itself. Most states give officers wide discretion to use whatever force
they reasonably believe is necessary to make an arrest or to protect
themselves, a standard that hinges on the officer’s perceptions of
danger during the encounter, legal scholars and criminologists say.

“The whole process is really reluctant to criminalize police behavior,” said Eugene O’Donnell,
a former prosecutor who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
in Manhattan. “The grand jurors are, the jurors are, the judges are,
the appellate courts are.”

The recent decisions to refrain from bringing charges on Staten Island
and in Ferguson have sparked protests because, among other things, they
seem to defy logic: Shouldn’t the cases be heard at trial, many
protesters have asked, and be decided by a full jury?

The
questions have strengthened calls for wholesale changes in the grand
jury system. Some elected leaders in New York have called for special
prosecutors, or the attorney general, to investigate all fatal police
encounters. Others say the current process should be stripped of its
cloak of secrecy.

No precise figures exist for the number of
people killed by the police in the United States, but police departments
each year voluntarily report about 400 “justifiable police homicides”
to the Federal Bureau of Investigation; it is an incomplete count,
criminologists say

Rarely do deaths lead to murder or manslaughter charges. Research by Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University, reports
that 41 officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter in
shootings while on duty over a seven-year period ending in 2011. Over
that same period, police departments reported 2,600 justifiable
homicides to the F.B.I.

Officer Kerrick was the first
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer charged in a fatal shooting in more
than 30 years. He was one of several officers who responded to a 911 call, placed by a woman who was alarmed by a stranger knocking at her door at 2:30 a.m.

Moments
earlier, Mr. Ferrell, a former safety for Florida A&M University,
had gotten into a car accident, and his vehicle had crashed into the
trees. He had walked a half-mile or so to seek help. Instead, Mr.
Ferrell, who was black, was mistaken for a burglar.

Officers
arrived 11 minutes after the call and approached Mr. Ferrell. Police
officials said Mr. Ferrell ran toward the officers and was hit with a Taser. When he continued to press forward, Officer Kerrick fired 12 bullets, 10 of which struck Mr. Ferrell.

Charles
G. Monnett III, a lawyer for Mr. Ferrell’s parents, said the indictment
would not have come had the state prosecutor not taken the case over
from the Mecklenburg County district attorney. “The district attorney’s
office works way too closely with the local police department and
individual officers to be able to objectively look at these cases,” he
said.

For most felonies, grand jury hearings are swift,
bare-bones proceedings. Prosecutors present enough evidence to show it
is probable that the defendant, who rarely testifies, committed a crime,
and ask the jury to vote for an indictment. Several cases are usually
processed in a single day.

But because most prosecutors impanel a
special grand jury to investigate police-related deaths, they insulate
themselves from the final decision, while appearing to fulfill the
public desire for an independent review, legal experts said. The
inquiries often go on for weeks or months, with testimony from several
witnesses.

The proceeding is transformed into a trial of sorts,
behind closed doors but without cross-examination. Prosecutors control
what witnesses appear and in what order, legal scholars said.

In
most cases, the officer provides his or her account; prosecutors can
decide to let an officer’s version of events go unchallenged or to
discredit it with cross-examination. They can do the same with other
witnesses.

“If the prosecutor wants an indictment she or he is
probably going to get one because they do have so much control over the
grand jury,” said Andrew D. Leipold,
a law professor at the University of Illinois who is an expert on grand
juries. “The accountability for the decision to charge or not to charge
rests with the prosecutor, not with the grand jury.”

The grand jury investigating the death
of Eric Garner on Staten Island sat for nine weeks and heard 50
witnesses, including Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who was videotaped as he
used his arm to choke Mr. Garner from behind during a fight to subdue
him. A medical examiner ruled
Mr. Garner died because of the compression of his chest and neck during
the struggle, but also listed his obesity, asthma and high blood
pressure as contributing factors. Mr. Garner said several times that he
could not breathe.

Geoffrey P. Alpert,
a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who studies the use
of force, said police officers are rarely indicted when they express
remorse to jurors, admit they made a mistake, and stress that they were
following their training, as Officer Pantaleo had.
In shooting cases, officers often testify that they perceived a deadly
threat and acted in self-defense. This stance can inoculate them even if
the threat later turns out to be false.

Pete Hautzinger, the
district attorney in Mesa County, Colorado, said the notion prosecutors
lead grand juries to a predetermined conclusion is false. Though he
rarely uses a grand jury on most felonies, he chose to present evidence
to a special grand jury in 2010 against a state trooper, Evan Lawyer,
who had shot and killed an unarmed man after he refused to open his
front door. The prosecutor said he wanted a “sounding board” to validate
his belief that there was enough evidence not only to warrant a trial,
but eventually convict the trooper.

“How do ordinary people react
to these facts, and what do they think is right here?” he said. Trooper
Lawyer was indicted and eventually acquitted at trial.

Even when
there is no hint that a victim was armed, it is difficult to bring a
homicide charge if the officer claims the death was an accident, legal
scholars say. Murder and manslaughter require proof that the officer
intended to kill or harm the victim. To bring a second-degree
manslaughter charge, one must show that the officer recklessly
disregarded the risk inherent in his or her actions. Criminally
negligent homicide requires a finding that the officer’s actions were “a
gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person
would observe.”

The jury’s only guide through the thicket of
legal concepts is the prosecutor. “The notion that average people are
going to delve into these complex legal issues and get them right is
bizarre,” Professor O’Donnell said. “You are doing a deep dive on issues
of justification, criminal negligence and recklessness.”

Still,
many prosecutors reject the notion that they control the grand juries’
conclusions. They also point out that the panels have worked for
centuries to protect the rights of the accused and shield witnesses who
might otherwise not testify.

“It tends to be a much more full
exchange about gathering the evidence than individuals on the outside
understand or believe,” said Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district
attorney. “It is a secret process. Folks don’t know that much about it.
But in practice, particularly in long investigations, I think the grand
jurors are very active.”

He added: “I’ve had grand jurors which
were very aggressive in trying to get me to put in evidence that I had
not previously considered to put in.”

When the drug maker Genentech
introduced a major product in 2006, it found itself in an awkward
position: persuading eye doctors to start using its new more expensive
drug instead of a popular cheaper version that the company already sold.

Ophthalmologists had been enthusiastically using the company’s cancer drug Avastin, which cost about $50 a dose, to treat a common eye disease in the elderly, wet macular degeneration. Then Genentech introduced Lucentis, a nearly equivalent drug that cost $2,000 a dose and was approved specifically to treat the disease.

Use of Lucentis took off, and it has become one of Medicare’s
most expensive treatments — costing the federal government about $1
billion a year — even though several studies have concluded Lucentis has
no significant advantage over its cheaper alternative.

Now, a
new federal database shows that many of the doctors who were the top
billers for Lucentis were also among the highest-paid consultants for
Genentech, earning thousands of dollars to help promote the drug. The
data raises questions about whether financial relationships between
doctors and drug companies influence treatment decisions, even though
physicians maintain they cannot be swayed.

Half of the 20 doctors
who received the most money from Genentech to promote Lucentis in 2013
were among the highest users of the drug in 2012, billing for higher
amounts of Lucentis than 75 percent of their peers. The figures were
compiled from two federal databases that covered different periods, and
it is not known whether or how much Genentech paid the doctors in 2012.

The
20 doctors earned $8,500 to $37,000 over five months in 2013, payments
that included consulting and speaking fees as well as travel expenses
and meals. Genentech says it has an annual cap of $50,000 a doctor for
speaking fees.

Specialists who study conflicts of interest
between physicians and the drug industry say even modest payments have
been shown to influence behavior.

“That’s why a sandwich is so
effective — no one wants to feel like they were being bought off for
$5,” said Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, an associate professor at Georgetown
University Medical Center in Washington and director of PharmedOut, a project that educates doctors about drug marketing claims. “That’s why they convince themselves that the drug is better.”

Doctors
who speak on behalf of Lucentis say they do so because they believe in
it and because they want to educate colleagues on its use. Some said
that while they continued to use Avastin, it carried risks that should
not be ignored.

“There are certain instances where you would
prefer one over the other,” said Alan Ruby, an ophthalmologist based in
Livonia, Mich., who received nearly $12,000 from Genentech in the second
half of 2013 for conducting what he described as workshops to educate
other medical professionals about Lucentis. Dr. Ruby said that Lucentis
was a better choice for some patients because of some evidence showing
that Avastin carries a slightly higher chance of strokes in patients who
are already at risk of developing them.

Dr. Ruby said he used
Avastin on roughly a quarter of his macular degeneration patients, and
used Lucentis more frequently. A federal database of Medicare
billing showed that he billed for a higher amount of Lucentis than 75
percent of his peers. “I think to suggest that physicians are in any way
influenced by their interactions with drug companies is very
shortsighted,” he said.

Edward Lang Jr., a spokesman for
Genentech, which is owned by the Swiss drug maker Roche, said the
company chose to work with doctors based on their clinical expertise.
“We’re looking to work with doctors who are in the top of their field,
and who can provide us an honest perspective on what patients need and
don’t need,” he said.

While Genentech says Lucentis is a better
option, it supports a doctor’s choice about what is best for a patient,
Mr. Lang said, adding, “That comes before us and anything else.”

Lucentis
and Avastin, as well as Regeneron’s drug Eylea, are prescribed for the
eye disease, which, if left untreated, can lead to blindness.
Use of Avastin became popular after clinical trials for Lucentis showed
that it worked well for macular degeneration. Doctors speculated that
Avastin, which works in the same way as Lucentis, could also be used to
treat the disease.

Since Lucentis was approved in 2006, several studies have shown that the drugs are nearly equivalent, including a large government-sponsored clinical
trial involving 1,200 patients that was completed in 2011. Avastin is
still the most popular choice of doctors: About half of patients who
were treated for wet macular degeneration received Avastin, with
Lucentis and Eylea sharing the rest of the market.

Genentech has
aggressively promoted Lucentis to doctors to encourage them to switch,
even paying rebates to those who use large amounts of Lucentis, a
practice that critics have described as improper but the company says is
legal. For Genentech, the stakes are high. Lucentis is one of its top
products, generating $1.3 billion in sales in the first nine months of
this year, an increase of 5 percent over that period last year.

Even
with widespread Avastin use, injecting Lucentis remains one of
Medicare’s costliest procedures. In 2010, Medicare paid $1 billion to
treat macular degeneration patients with Lucentis, while it spent $27
million for such patients treated with Avastin, according to a 2012
study from the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of
Health and Human Services.

In 2011, the office determined that if
all patients being treated with Lucentis were instead given Avastin,
the federal government would have saved about $1.4 billion.

A review
released this year of nine clinical trials showed that Avastin and
Lucentis had similar safety profiles and that Avastin did not appear to
increase deaths or serious side effects. The review was conducted by the
nonprofit Cochrane Collaboration.Still, several doctors, including
those who speak on behalf of Lucentis and those who do not, said the
choice between Avastin and Lucentis was not simply a matter of cost.

For
example, Lucentis is specially prepared to be injected into the eye,
but Avastin must be divided into smaller doses by outside compounding
pharmacies, which can lead to contamination in rare cases. In 2011, more than a dozen people developed severe eye infections, and some were blinded, after they received injections of contaminated Avastin.

Some doctors say there is no good reason to use Lucentis more frequently than Avastin.

“They
keep talking about evidence-based medicine, and they keep pretending
the corporate-sponsored research is nonbiased,” said J. Gregory
Rosenthal, a retina specialist in Toledo who has become an outspoken
critic of Lucentis and Eylea. “The evidence says that Avastin has at
least the clinical efficacy of Lucentis and is perhaps safer.”

Some
doctors who were paid to promote Lucentis said they also used Avastin.
“I usually start with Avastin,” said Dr. Mathew MacCumber, a retina
specialist in Illinois who received about $8,500 from Genentech from
August through December 2013, mostly to advise the company on topics
that included how to promote the drug to doctors.

He received
even more, about $16,000, from Regeneron in connection with Eylea, which
was approved in 2011. Dr. MacCumber says he switches patients to
Lucentis or Eylea if they do not do well on Avastin. He said some
patients asked for those two drugs because they are F.D.A.-approved to
treat macular degeneration. The federal Medicare database showed that
the amount he billed for Lucentis was more than 50 percent of his peers.
Dr. MacCumber, who noted he is a retina specialist who treats a high
number of patients with macular degeneration, said he also used Lucentis
to treat other eye conditions.

Dr. MacCumber said he worked for
the companies because it was the best way to learn about the drugs. He
says he is not influenced by the money he receives in compensation for
his time. “People come to me and ask my advice, so I have to know the
real story about things, and the only way to really do that is to know
the people in the company who do the research, who know the drug the
best,” he said.

Eric Campbell, a professor of health care policy
at Harvard Medical School, said doctors frequently denied that
relationships with drug companies could change their behavior, despite
many studies to the contrary. “They are suggesting that the drug
companies that are spending this money, that these companies are dumb
enough to be wasting their money,” he said.

Not
every top Lucentis biller was paid to promote the drug. In fact,
several of the highest billers in 2012 got no such payments.

Mr.
Campbell said that was because drug companies selected doctors based on
their sway in their community. “You don’t have to influence every
doctor, you just have to influence the right doctors,” he said.

Agustin Armendariz contributed reporting.

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15) Military-Style Technology Finds Way Into School District Safety Measures

METHUEN,
Mass. — With a rapid-response team and regular lockdown drills, the
school district here, like many across the country, has long been
steeling itself for the nightmare scenario of a school shooting.

But
over the past two years, a new high-tech approach has been tested at
one of the schools here — officials will not say which one — to see
whether it is possible to react more effectively.

Engineers from a
company called Shooter Detection Systems have installed infrared
sensors and microphones that can pick up the sound of gunfire and
immediately notify school and law enforcement officials where and when
it has occurred. It was installed free of charge, and school officials
were hoping they could find the money to put the system, which costs
between $20,000 and $100,000, into more schools.

It does not stop
the first shot, but company officials say the system can shorten an
attack by taking the human element out of alerting the authorities.“The
time it takes for police to even be notified can take many, many
minutes,” said Christian Connors, the company’s chief executive. “What
our device does is lessen the time.”

But there is debate about
whether military-style measures like a gunshot-detection system are as
valuable as more prevention-minded methods. Many experts say limited
resources may be better spent on mental health services, training for
teachers and students on what to do if their peers talk about bringing a
gun to school, or on officers trained to keep schools safe.

Officials
in this city of about 50,000, on the New Hampshire border, say their
district’s five buildings are no more likely than any other to
experience a mass shooting, although they do perimeter lockdowns from
time to time when there is crime in the area. But Police Chief Joseph
Solomon said he nevertheless tried to stay ahead on school safety
practices.

“You can’t just look at your location — you have to
look at how is the world changing,” Chief Solomon said. “You see a
propensity for violence to increase.”

Company officials say they
have tested the system with thousands of rounds of fire, when students
were not in school. In the first public demonstration of the system last
month, a police officer posing as a gunman with an AR-15-style assault
rifle fired blank rounds in the lobby and school hallways. The police
said the system helped them apprehend the “shooter” in less than three
minutes.

Mr. Connors used to work on market development for
military technology that locates incoming fire, which has been used in
Afghanistan. He founded the company last year, he said, to commercialize
the technology.

“We look at it like a smoke alarm. We have procedures for that,” Mr. Connors said. “We have no technology for gunfire.”

Mr.
Connors said his system had been installed in a school in California,
and another installation is planned in Virginia. The company has
corporate orders for the system and has tested it in a major airport, he
said.

Another company, SST, which makes shot-detection systems for city streets, is rolling out
a similar system at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia.
Officials here and at the college emphasized that they used preventive
methods, too.

It was easy to persuade the administration to pay
for the system, said John Buckovich, the chief of public safety at the
Savannah art college. He said the system would hasten the arrival of law
enforcement officials in a shooting even if those on campus were
scrambling to flee or protect themselves. “Their first reaction may not
be to call 911,” Mr. Buckovich said.

He added, “If you can reduce
the time that it takes law enforcement to respond on the scene, then
you reduce the chance of injury to persons in the situation like this.”

The
demonstration here was warmly received by residents. Chief Solomon
suggested that such systems needed to become a building code standard.
Representative Niki Tsongas, a Democrat, who watched the demonstration,
praised what she saw.

“It is the same technology that has been
utilized thousands of times by our military to keep soldiers safe in
some of the most dangerous locations around the globe,” Ms. Tsongas said
in a statement.

But school safety experts questioned whether technology developed with Afghan battlefields in mind was optimal for schools.

“There’s
an illusion that having all these video cameras, metal detectors,
sensors, SWAT kinds of people on campus makes the place safer,” said Ron
Avi Astor, a professor of social work and education at the University
of Southern California. “The problem is from an educational perspective:
It doesn’t feel safer. It feels like a prison.”

Mr. Astor said
he would prefer to see more effort put into educating students and
teachers on recognizing and responding to threats as they emerge. “This
is a social issue that needs to be solved, that can only be solved
through education,” he said.

Kenneth Trump, a school safety
consultant, compared the technology to the bulletproof whiteboards and
backpacks that have been marketed to schools and parents since the Sandy
Hook school shooting two years ago in Newtown, Conn.

Mr. Trump
said he thought this was “one of the many well-intended but not
well-thought-out items that’s being pitched to pre-K-through-12 school
environments in a post-Sandy Hook world.”

“We need to go back and
focus on a lot of the proven, reliable things,” he said, “versus
feeding into the emotional frenzy that a lot of these efforts over the
past two years have tried to address.”

There are concerns, too,
about whether the design of this system can protect victims in shootings
that can end in just a few minutes.

“With this system, somebody
wants to kill someone, they’ll just come on campus with a gun and by the
time there’s an indication that there’s gunfire, the target of the
perpetrator is dead,” said Ronald D. Stephens, the executive director of
the National School Safety Center. He added that he would not recommend
that every district buy such systems.

Proponents of the system argue that anything that can reduce response time in a school shooting has value.

“This
is just another step in the direction of making responses more
effective to the shooters,” said Bernard James, a law professor at
Pepperdine University. He said he expected such technology eventually to
be integrated into existing alarm systems.

In town, parents
welcomed what they viewed as another layer of security for children.
Darlene Franzone, 54, said she hoped the system might be a deterrent,
adding that she often worries about shootings in public places, like
movie theaters or the gym.

CLEVELAND
— The mother of a 12-year-old boy shot by a Cleveland policeman says
she wants him convicted for killing her son, who was carrying a pellet
gun that police say looked real.

Tamir Rice was confronted Nov.
22 when officers responded to a 911 call about someone with a gun near a
playground. Surveillance video shows him being shot within 2 seconds of
a patrol car stopping nearby.

Samaria (suh-MAR'-ee-uh) Rice said
at a news conference Monday that a friend gave her son the airsoft gun,
which shot nonlethal plastic pellets.

The family's new attorneys say they want a transparent investigation. A grand jury will consider whether charges are merited.

Other attorneys have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city on behalf of Tamir's family.

The city isn't commenting on the lawsuit.

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17) I Can’t Be Forgiven for Abu GhraibThe Torture Report Reminds Us of What America Was

BETHLEHEM,
Pa. — I SPENT this semester teaching creative writing at Lehigh
University. I’ve been a soldier, a police officer and an interrogator.
So hearing students call me “Professor” and assigning homework was a
significant change of pace.

But the course’s title, Writing War,
kept me from straying too far from the memories that have haunted me
over the last decade. I am grateful to Lehigh for the opportunity to
teach the course. The school’s willingness to put a veteran in the
classroom is the very thing this country needs to be doing in order to
collectively process what the last 13 years of war have wrought. But
teaching a class about war reminded me daily that I am no college
professor.

I was an interrogator at Abu Ghraib. I tortured.Abu
Ghraib dominates every minute of every day for me. In early 2004,
workers inside Abu Ghraib were scrambling to cover the murals of Saddam
Hussein with a coat of yellowish paint. I accidentally leaned up against
one of those walls. I still wear the black fleece jacket with the faded
stain. I still smell the paint. I still hear the sounds. I still see
the men we called detainees.

Last month, my students at Lehigh
read “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. During class I talked
about the things American soldiers carried in Iraq. I brought in a cigar
box filled with the trinkets and mementos I had purchased from Iraqi
vendors at Baghdad International Airport. I brought along the black
fleece jacket.When I asked the students to share their memories of the
release in 2004 of the Abu Ghraib photographs showing the abuse of
detainees, I received the sort of looks students give when they think
they should know something and are too embarrassed to admit they don’t.
Most avoided eye contact, some gave a sort of noncommittal nod, while
others went for pure honesty and just yawned.

It was my first
encounter with a generation that doesn’t consider the release of the Abu
Ghraib photographs to be a critical moment in their lives. I don’t
fault them. They were in elementary school at the time. It’s something
for history books. It’s something their parents talk about. It’s an
answer on a test.

As I looked at their blank faces, I realized I
could let myself feel a powerful sense of relief. Abu Ghraib will fade.
My transgressions will be forgotten. But only if I allow it.

I’ve
published articles in newspapers detailing our abusive treatment of
Iraqi detainees. I’ve done interviews on TV and radio. I’ve spoken to
groups from Amnesty International, and I’ve confessed everything to a
lawyer from the Department of Justice and two agents from the Army’s
Criminal Investigation Command. I’ve said everything there is to say.
It’s not hard to pretend the best thing to do is put it all behind me.

I
stood before the class that day tempted to let apathy soften the
painful truths of history. I no longer had to assume the role of the
former interrogator at Abu Ghraib. I was a professor at Lehigh
University. I could grade papers and say smart things in class. My son
could ride the bus to school and talk to his friends about what his
father does for a living. I was someone to be proud of.

But I’m
not. I was an interrogator at Abu Ghraib. I tortured.Eventually I
encouraged the students to track down the photos from Abu Ghraib and
record their reactions in creative essays. We spent time talking about
the abuses that took place and I even exposed them to some of my own
writing. They still called me “Professor,” but I suspect they no longer
thought of me as one.

Today, the Senate released its torture
report. Many people were surprised by what it contained: accounts of
waterboardings far more frequent than what had previously been reported,
weeklong sleep deprivation, a horrific and humiliating procedure called
“rectal rehydration.” I’m not surprised. I assure you there is more;
much remains redacted.

Most Americans haven’t read the report. Most never will. But it stands as a permanent reminder of the country we once were.

In
some future college classroom, a professor will require her students to
read about the things this country did in the early years of the 21st
century. She’ll assign portions of the Senate torture report. There will
be blank stares and apathetic yawns. There will be essays and writing
assignments. The students will come to know that this country isn’t
always something to be proud of.

Eric Fair, an Army veteran, was a contract interrogator in Iraq in 2004.

Even
by the abysmal standards of lawyering that defendants in capital trials
regularly endure, Robert Wayne Holsey’s case stands out.

In
1997, Mr. Holsey was convicted and sentenced to death for killing a
Georgia sheriff’s deputy named Will Robinson, who had pulled him over
for robbing a convenience store. Despite evidence that Mr. Holsey was
intellectually disabled — which should have barred him from execution
under the United States Supreme Court’s earlier rulings — his lawyer
neglected to make that argument at trial. Mr. Holsey was executed on Tuesday evening after the Supreme Court declined to stay his execution.

The
evidence of Mr. Holsey’s mental deficits included an I.Q. test score of
70 when he was 15. In school, his intellectual functioning did not move
past a fourth-grade level. But under Georgia law, a defendant is
required to prove his intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt —
the strictest standard in the country and one unmoored from scientific
reality.

Mr. Holsey’s new lawyers challenged Georgia’s standard under a Supreme Court decision issued in May that reaffirmed and clarified its 2002 ban
on executing intellectually disabled people. Laws that do not provide a
fair chance to prove intellectual disability, the court wrote, “deny
the basic dignity the Constitution protects.” The justices should have
stayed Mr. Holsey’s death sentence on that ground alone. The egregious
failures of his trial lawyer, Andy Prince, added to the injustice.

During
the trial, Mr. Prince, a lifelong alcoholic, was drinking a quart of
vodka a day. He was also facing his own criminal investigation for
stealing more than $100,000 in client funds. Before the trial was over,
he was arrested and charged with brandishing a gun, threatening to shoot
his black neighbors and yelling racial slurs at them. (Mr. Prince is
white, and Mr. Holsey is black.)

Mr. Prince, who was disbarred
and sent to prison for theft of funds, later said, “I shouldn’t have
been representing anybody in any case.”

Georgia, like other
“death belt” states, will go to great lengths to execute the people it
has sentenced to death. It is hard to understand how the Supreme Court,
which spoke so clearly on the unconstitutionality of executing
intellectually disabled people, could stand aside and allow Mr. Holsey
to die.

On
May 23, 1957, three police officers arrived at a house in Cleveland and
demanded to enter. They wanted to question a man about a recent bombing
and believed he was hiding inside. A woman who lived there, Dollree
Mapp, refused to admit them.

It was a small gesture of defiance that led to a landmark United States Supreme Court ruling on the limits of police power.

Ms.
Mapp told the officers that she wanted to see a search warrant. They
did not produce one. A few hours later, more officers arrived and forced
their way into the house. Ms. Mapp called her lawyer and again asked to
see a warrant. When one officer held up a piece of paper that he said
was a warrant, Ms. Mapp snatched it and stuffed it into her blouse. The
officer reached inside her clothing and snatched it back.

The
officers handcuffed Ms. Mapp — they called her “belligerent” — and then
searched her bedroom, where they paged through a photo album and
personal papers. They also searched her young daughter’s room, the
kitchen, a dining area and the basement.

They did not find the
man they were looking for, but they did find what they said were
sexually explicit materials — books and drawings that Ms. Mapp said had
belonged to a previous boarder — and they arrested Ms. Mapp.

Four
years later, after Ms. Mapp had been sentenced to prison on obscenity
charges and after her conviction had been upheld on appeal, the Supreme
Court took up the case, ostensibly because of questions it raised about
obscenity and the First Amendment.

But when the justices ruled,
in June 1961, their decision dwelled, with far more significant
consequences, on the role of the Fourth Amendment, which protects
against unlawful search and seizure. Prosecutors had never produced the
supposed warrant brandished by the Cleveland police or proved that it
had existed.

The court ruled, 6 to 3, that Ms. Mapp’s conviction
should be thrown out, and that all state courts must suppress evidence
gathered through police misconduct in certain kinds of cases.

Even
though Ms. Mapp’s name is etched in legal history, she had lived
quietly in recent years, and besides a brief notice on a funeral home
website, it took more than a month for her death to be reported. She was
believed to be 90 or 91 when she died on Oct. 31, in or near Conyers,
Ga.

Colorful, sometimes brash, Ms. Mapp was married for a time to Jimmy Bivins, a top-ranked fighter who died in 2012.
She was later engaged to Archie Moore, a light-heavyweight champion,
whom she sued in 1956 for $750,000, claiming he had assaulted her and
had backed out of their marriage plans. (He died in 1998.)
The bombing that officers were investigating in 1957 had been at the
home of Don King, who would go on to become a famous boxing promoter.
Ms. Mapp’s encounter with the police that day would not be her last
run-in with the law.

Mapp v. Ohio may not ring as familiar as
other cases involving civil rights and civil liberties, but it became a
legal touchstone that continues to shape cases and stir debate.

Before
the ruling, federal courts were required to suppress evidence gathered
illegally. The decision extended the rule — known as the exclusionary
rule — to state courts. The change has put continuing pressure on police
departments to conduct investigations lawfully and brought increased
scrutiny when their actions appear improper. Countless cases have been
affected, and sometimes thrown out.

“The state, by admitting
evidence unlawfully seized, serves to encourage disobedience to the
federal Constitution which it is bound to uphold,” Justice Tom C. Clark
wrote in the majority opinion.

Justice Clark wrote that evidence
gathered illegally had to be excluded. Other measures to address such
conduct had proved “worthless and futile.”

Court decisions in the
past quarter-century have made exceptions to the exclusionary rule in
certain cases when evidence was gathered improperly — for example, if a
law enforcement agency appears to have made the errors in good faith
when it followed incorrect legal guidance or relied on incorrect
information provided by another agency.

The current chief
justice, John G. Roberts Jr., was a lawyer in the Reagan administration
in the 1980s and helped it attack the exclusionary rule through
litigation, proposed legislation and other means. In 2009, he wrote the
majority opinion in Herring v. United States,
a 5-to-4 decision that upheld the conviction of Bennie D. Herring after
a search led to his arrest on drug and weapons charges based on false
information that he was the subject of a warrant.

Some of the
rule’s supporters worry that it could be significantly weakened or
abolished under the current court. Jeffrey Fisher, a professor at
Stanford Law School, said the issue would most likely go before the high
court again as Herring is interpreted by lower courts.

Dollree
Mapp was born in 1923 or 1924, according to census records, one of
seven children of Samuel and Mary Mapp. She grew up in Forest, Miss. Her
first name was spelled several ways in early records, and she was
sometimes called Dolly. As an adult, Ms. Mapp gave numerous dates for
her birth; public records show a wide range.

Information about
her survivors was not immediately available. Her death was confirmed by
the funeral home in Conyers that handled her services.

In 1968,
Ms. Mapp moved from Cleveland to Queens. Two years later she was charged
with possession of narcotics. Convicted in 1971 with a co-defendant,
Alan Lyons, she pursued a series of appeals, claiming that the search
warrant used in her arrest had been wrongly issued and that the police
had targeted her because of her role in Mapp v. Ohio.

The drugs
seized in the case were found at an apartment that Mr. Lyons apparently
rented from Ms. Mapp. She lived several miles away. The police searched
her home and found rent receipts that prosecutors argued established her
as having aided and abetted Mr. Lyons. The officer who had applied for
the warrant to search Ms. Mapp’s home was later dismissed from the
police force after he was determined to have accepted about $3,500 from a
narcotics dealer.

Ms. Mapp’s conviction was upheld, and she
served time in the New York State Correctional Institution at Bedford
Hills. On Dec. 31, 1980, Gov. Hugh Carey commuted her sentence, making
her immediately eligible for parole.